"We'll do that," he said. "Ordinarily, I handle the after gun when we
sight a monster, but somebody'll have to help Abdullah with the
engines."
He spoke to his father about it. Joe Kivelson nodded.
"Walt's made some awful lucky shots with that target pistol of his, I
know that," he said, "and I saw him make hamburger out of a slasher,
once, with a chopper. Have somebody blow a couple of wax skins full of
air for targets, and when we get a little farther southeast, we'll go
down to the surface and have some shooting."
I convinced Murell that the sunset would still be there in a couple of
hours, and we took our luggage down and found the cubbyhole he and I
would share with Tom for sleeping quarters. A hunter-ship looks big on
the outside, but there's very little room for the crew. The engines
are much bigger than would be needed on an ordinary contragravity
craft, because a hunter-ship operates under water as well as in the
air. Then, there's a lot of cargo space for the wax, and the boat
berth aft for the scout boat, so they're not exactly built for
comfort. They don't really need to be; a ship's rarely out more than a
hundred and fifty hours on any cruise.
Murell had done a lot of reading about every phase of the wax
business, and he wanted to learn everything he could by actual
observation. He said that Argentine Exotic Organics was going to keep
him here on Fenris as a resident buyer and his job was going to be to
deal with the hunters, either individually or through their
co-operative organization, if they could get rid of Ravick and set up
something he could do business with, and he wanted to be able to talk
the hunters' language and understand their problems.
So I took him around over the boat, showing him everything and
conscripting any crew members I came across to explain what I
couldn't. I showed him the scout boat in its berth, and we climbed
into it and looked around. I showed him the machine that packed the
wax into skins, and the cargo holds, and the electrolytic gills that
extracted oxygen from sea water while we were submerged, and the
ship's armament. Finally, we got to the engine room, forward. He
whistled when he saw the engines.
"Why, those things are big enough for a five-thousand-ton freighter,"
he said.
"They have to be," I said. "Running submerged isn't the same as
running in atmosphere. You ever done any swimming?"
He shook his head. "I was born in Antarctica, on Terra. The water's a
little too cold to do much swimming there. And I've spent most of my
time since then in central Argentine, in the pampas country. The
sports there are horseback riding and polo and things like that."
Well, whattaya know! Here was a man who had not only seen a horse, but
actually ridden one. That in itself was worth a story in the _Times_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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